Reading response----Was Pythagoras Chinese- Revisiting an Old Debate

Pythagorean theory is one of the most important theories in Euclidean geometry. When the Chinese high school Math teachers introduce the gou-gu theorem (another name of Pythagorean theory in China), they always emphasis that, "No, the gou-gu theorem is not invented by Gou Gu, no such a person called Gou Gu. Gou represents the long leg, and Gu represents the short leg, Xian represents the hypotenuse. Gou three, Gu four, and Xian five." 

Students always try to get some information more or less from the name of the theories or laws. For example, Newton's laws of universal gravitation, and Newton's laws of motion. Students could know that these laws was firstly formulated and published by Newton. The theories, such as Euclid-Euler theorem and Galileo's Principle, get named after their originators probably because people could easily reference them by  their names. For example, Galileo Principle was given by Galileo in his second book " Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences" published in 1638.

For Math teachers, I think it is unnecessary to intend to avoid acknowledging non-European sources of mathematics. If the source of mathematics is appropriate to support their teaching practice, they could use it to enrich students' knowledge base.  There are hundreds of proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. Different proofs use different mathematical theories. For example, Garfield's Proof used the knowledge of area of trapezoid.  Chinese Zhaoshuang's proof used the knowledge of squares of binomials. Teachers could choose those proofs to support their teaching if the proofs are relevant and appropriate.